pagerdutyduty - generating PagerDuty schedules

Scheduling on-call schedules has always been a bit of a pain, especially given the way we rotate shifts. PagerDuty’s interface really only satisfies one type of on-call schedule: scheduling people manually for multi-day or week-long blocks of 24/7 coverage.

At Olark, we prefer to have our on-call schedule rotate through people much more rapidly, in several hour blocks. This enables us to spread the obligation out a bit more fairly, and have the whole team as backup — plus it enables us to give every team member the guarantee that they’ll be free at least 6 hours every night.

The only real downside to this approach is that creating the schedule involves quite a bit of manual planning to put together. Not to mention, if you hire a new team member (something we like to do) your whole schedule is invalid and needs to be recalculated and recreated.

Unfortunately in PagerDuty, there's no way to temporarily remove someone from the on-call schedule (non- destructively). So if someone goes on vacation for two weeks — same thing, the whole schedule is invalid, as long as they’re scheduled, but not available.

To scratch this itch, we built pagerdutyduty, a tool that reads in a YAML file specifying your team members, their on/off hours, and the layers of your on-call schedule you’d like to fill.

Via the PagerDuty API, pagerdutyduty will create the perfect on-call schedule given your criteria. For example, let’s say you want your ops team on call 24/7 in rotating four hour blocks. Just create an on-call layer in YAML like so:

layers:
    \- name: ops1
      source: ops
      respect_offhours: False
      block_size: 4

And you want the whole engineering team as backup 24/7 (but giving people at least 6 hours off each night, according to time zone) in rotating one hour blocks:

layers:
    \- name: everyone1
    source: engineering
    block_size: 4

But make sure not to schedule Julie, since she's on vacation:

users:
    \- id: P8EI9BL
    offhours: [EST]
    tags: [engineering]
    vacation: True
`

Run pagerdutyduty with your PagerDuty API access key, and voilà, you’ve got a schedule that matches your criteria. Check out the Github page for the project, or pip install pagerdutyduty. Right now the project satisfies our narrow use-case, but could possibly be a great place to start building something to satisfy yours!